Lights Out Films

Emerson Hell

I was a freshman in college in 1997. This may not seem as though it was that long ago, and truth be told, it wasn’t. As an aside, why am I becoming so nostalgic all of a sudden? Perhaps my advancing age.

Back then, the internet was just coming into its own and if there was a place to get connected, it was the educational instituion. Most of America wasn’t connecting, and if they were, it was their kids at home dialing into AOL via 14.4 modem. Incidentally, I’m also old enough to remember the pre-AOL days, when dialing into the local BBS was the cool thing to do. If you could get in.

In college, one dorm had a high speed connection to the internet. We weren’t at that dorm. We had to dial into the campus network via 14.4 modem. This was the rise of MP3. Napster had yet to hit the scene, and finding a single MP3 was a long, involved and idiotic process. Nonetheless, we downloaded away, sometime tying up the phone line for over an hour to get a shitty P-Diddy song recorded at a horrible compression rate.

Incidentally, we also lived in a really run down dorm. One of the worst on campus (I say so lovingly, of course) that looked more like a Motel Six than actual student housing. Of course, looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But, being the hellions that we were, we decided to do what we knew best. That is, of course, to complain in a funny, loud and obnoxious manner.

We created a site (called Emerson Hell) and then proceeded to fill it with tales of disgust and anger at the people around us. All in a tongue and cheek way, after all. Searching the university website, we were also able to find completely spammable distribution lists for nearly every student on campus. In these wonderful, pre-spam days, we were able to email out our Emerson Hell web address and rant to most students on campus.

Internet Pioneers, I say.

Professors would write back, angry at our misuse of the campus email system, but given our advanced technical skills (read: Hotmail.com), they were unable to trace us. I would laugh and giggle with glee at the haughty and presumptuous academic tone.

My only regret is that we lacked the foresight to save the site, the emails and gather them for all time. It was swiftly deleted a month or two after the experiment started. Still, I keep those rebel internet-nerd memories gathered in my head. I was there. I was causing trouble on the internet way back then. Maybe I should have learned my lesson then.

This was our logo. I’m not kidding. I just found it on the internet, after remembering that it was an evil clown picture.